Well, it doesn't work if you want to buy stuff stuff stuff all the time, but then neither does ordinary shopping. What I've seen isn't substantially more expensive than ordinary high street shops. If one is so strapped for cash that one cannot afford those prices, one can take a different ethical solution and purchase clothes in charity shops, get an allotment (these are cheap, although one may have to wait a while) and grow one's own veg, learn to forage, and so on to make the money go further. Or just not eat so much chocolate or coffee or banananas or rice; there's a lot to be said for eating local.
Life is expensive. If I buy something new very cheaply, I expect that either it will be very poor quality or someone somewhere is suffering for my thrift. The richness of material goods we enjoy in this country is not realistic; it's not something that can be globally attained, it isn't sustainable. We like the lie that we arne't taking more than our fair share, we like the illusion that the monetary price of things actually reflects the true cost in human and environmental terms, but we're wrong.
My main problem at the moment is trying to find ethical clothes that fit. Long Tall Sally don't make any point of being fairtrade, and everything else is too damned short, and I really, really need to learn to sew much better, because there is enough fairtrade/recycled fabric around that I could solve this.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2006-10-03 06:16 pm (UTC)Life is expensive. If I buy something new very cheaply, I expect that either it will be very poor quality or someone somewhere is suffering for my thrift. The richness of material goods we enjoy in this country is not realistic; it's not something that can be globally attained, it isn't sustainable. We like the lie that we arne't taking more than our fair share, we like the illusion that the monetary price of things actually reflects the true cost in human and environmental terms, but we're wrong.
My main problem at the moment is trying to find ethical clothes that fit. Long Tall Sally don't make any point of being fairtrade, and everything else is too damned short, and I really, really need to learn to sew much better, because there is enough fairtrade/recycled fabric around that I could solve this.